Best of the Decade #9

It’s almost astonishing now to think of the teakettle tempest that erupted when Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne were awarded the Palme d’Or for their Rosetta by David Cronenberg’s Cannes jury in 1999. That such a seemingly modest slice of peculiarly assertive social realism could triumph in a field almost exclusively reserved for art-house white elephants or Hollywood fare inflated by critical fawning was, at the very least, highly unlikely. Yet Cronenberg and company’s verdict was not simply a career-making coup for the brothers, but a rather bold recognition of those spaces going unfilled in contemporary cinema. Against the turf-staking instincts of so many of even the best filmmakers, the Dardennes had created a supple aesthetic that was wholly theirs while being eminently sharable. Their combination of formalist rigor, documentary immediacy, and social concern, if masterful, was far from novel; but the uniqueness of their work lay in something less quantifiable and categorizable. There is a pulsing life in the films that goes beyond their bobbing, neck-breathing camera, an inexorable pull towards the metaphysical while never departing from the most concrete of settings and situations. Read Andrew Tracy on The Son.

It’s almost astonishing now to think of the teakettle tempest that erupted when Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne were awarded the Palme d’Or for their Rosetta by David Cronenberg’s Cannes jury in 1999. That such a seemingly modest slice of peculiarly assertive social realism could triumph in a field almost exclusively reserved for art-house white elephants or Hollywood fare inflated by critical fawning was, at the very least, highly unlikely. Yet Cronenberg and company’s verdict was not simply a career-making coup for the brothers, but a rather bold recognition of those spaces going unfilled in contemporary cinema. Against the turf-staking instincts of so many of even the best filmmakers, the Dardennes had created a supple aesthetic that was wholly theirs while being eminently sharable. Their combination of formalist rigor, documentary immediacy, and social concern, if masterful, was far from novel; but the uniqueness of their work lay in something less quantifiable and categorizable. There is a pulsing life in the films that goes beyond their bobbing, neck-breathing camera, an inexorable pull towards the metaphysical while never departing from the most concrete of settings and situations. Read Andrew Tracy on The Son.